$15 Now, Tomorrow the World!

It didn’t take long after my departure from The Stranger for my former colleagues to start going McGinn all over Kshama Sawant in a half-hearted attempt to, I dunno, look all serious and independent at her expense? Or something.

Coincidence? Feel free to speculate all you want.

The post could use a thorough fisking, but suffice it to say that Dom’s thesis is silly. Refusing to answer a question is not the same thing as saying “no.” Besides, to imply that Sawant’s steadfast support for $15 now somehow equates to a refusal to compromise would be like saying that I oppose Obamacare because I passionately support a single-payer system. What we want in life and what we ultimately accept are often two different things. How we get there is the game that’s currently afoot, and by refusing to compromise early, Sawant is playing the game a helluva lot better than Democrats did on health care reform.

But I must say that I am generally amused by the larger air of consternation from political and media know-it-alls over both Sawant’s posturing and her relentless execution of the 15Now.org campaign. Oh, the powers that be should be concerned, but not for the reasons they imagine. For the conventional perception of Sawant as an accidental council member is obstructing their view of what is arguably the most ambitious grassroots organizing effort Seattle has seen in the ten years I’ve been covering local politics—and a very real threat to the Democratic Party’s virtual monopoly on city government.

For the record, 15Now.org serves three distinct (though related) purposes:

The first and most obvious purpose is to prepare to fight a ballot measure campaign. Whether this is the $15 minimum wage now initiative—with no exemptions or phase-ins—that the organization threatens, or a campaign to defend a Sawant-blessed council-passed compromise ordinance from a business-backed effort to repeal via referendum, makes no difference. Sawant and her Socialist Alternative comrades believe that something is likely to go to the ballot in November, and so they are building a campaign organization to support or oppose it. That’s just plain smart.

The second purpose served by 15Now.org—the one that so many establishment types and their surrogates appear to resent the most—is strategic. Do you think Sawant really wants to go to the ballot? Of course not. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” wrote Sun Tzu in The Art of War, and that is Sawant’s goal during these minimum wage negotiations. To this end, 15Now.org serves as the threat of force necessary to make diplomacy possible. Either produce a compromise ordinance that Sawant can accept, or face the hundreds of volunteers she is organizing throughout the city in a public battle over the already popular $15 minimum wage. Does the business community really want to take that risk?

Which brings us to the final purpose of 15Now.org, and the one that eye-rolling establishment types appear to miss entirely, despite the fact that it is occurring right under their noses: Sawant is using the $15 minimum wage issue as an opportunity to build the equivalent of a political party capable of pushing her socialist agenda far beyond the minimum wage issue itself.

Want to know why folks always show up at Sawant events? Because her volunteers are relentlessly contacting the growing list of fellow travelers they are assembling. Before every event I get an email. And a text message or three. And a bunch of tweets. And a robocall. And most impressively, a live person calling me to ask me to show my support. Seattle has rarely seen such an effective GOTV campaign for a local issue, and never outside of an election campaign cycle.

At every event 15Now.org volunteers are there with clipboards signing up even more volunteers and supporters. They’ve already organized eight neighborhood “action groups” scattered throughout the city, with a goal of organizing as many as 100 over the next few months. This is the equivalent of the established parties’ LD system—semi-autonomous neighborhood groups available for door-belling, phone-banking, fund-raising, and everything else that makes a party function. It’s a low bar, sure, but after just a few months it is safe to say that 15Now.org has already surpassed the Republican Party in terms of actively participating members within Seattle city limits.

To be clear, Sawant and her Socialist Alternative colleagues are not one-issue activists. They are using this one issue as a means of building a permanent organization capable of pushing forth their broader agenda on affordable housing, progressive taxation, and more. And their sights are not set simply on Seattle. Socialist Alternative chapters in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and elsewhere are using 15Now.org‘s efforts here as a model for expanding the campaign nationwide. The word “now” may be prominently emblazoned in the organization’s domain name, but their emphasis is clearly on the future.

It is an outrageously ambitious goal. But those who laugh at Sawant as naive and out-of-touch and easy pickings for a Democratic machine-backed challenger in 2015, are in for a shock. For outside of the quadrennial statewide coordinated campaign, there is no Democratic machine. Only labor can man the type of campaign organization 15Now.org is attempting to build, and if you think that labor is going shiv an incumbent Sawant in favor of some mushy Dem, think again. Sawant is useful to labor, even if they don’t fully trust her, because she drags the whole council to the left.

You don’t need to be an ideological ally nor a pollyanna about their prospects to be impressed by what 15Now.org is doing. But you do need to be an idiot to ignore it.

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Everywhere I go people have heard of 15Now. I sat next to a self described “economic conservative” from Idaho on a plane ride. He was for it. I am now reading HA first for my digest of local politics. I guess telling people that Horse’s Ass is my primary source for local politics is only a little more awkward than saying it’s The Stranger.

Don’t be too sure. For years, Republicans have fought moderate Democratic policies by labeling them “socialistic.” They’ve had great success at widening the income gap and concentrating wealth. If they push this too far, someday they may find themselves living under a real socialist government.

Speculate all we want? Okay, Dan Savage, reports Joel Connelly, hired Goldy to be Dan Savage’s Dan Savage. Dan Savage, I think, also has been pretty supportive of the $15 minimum wage, and I don’t think he’s posted anything about that since Goldy left. So Dan Savage may not be long for the Stranger.

I found an interesting comment in an investing blog that I want to share:

“Depressions occur after investment bubbles burst. In free-market capitalism, capital generates income for the owners of the capital which in turn is used to create additional capital. This is very good. Sometimes, it can be actually too good. As capital continues to accumulate, its owners find it more and more difficult to deploy it efficiently. The business sector generally must interact with the household sector by selling goods and services or lending to them. When capital accumulates too rapidly, the productive capacity of the business sector can outpace the ability of the household sector to absorb the increasing production.

“The capitalists, or if you prefer, job creators use their increasing wealth and income to reinvest, thus increasing the productive capacity of the business they own. They also lend their accumulated wealth to other businesses as well as other entities after they have exhausted opportunities within the business they own. As they seek to deploy ever more capital, excess factories, housing and shopping centers are built and more and more dubious loans are made. This is overinvestment. As one banker described the events leading up to 2008 – First the banks lent all they could to those who could pay them back and then they started to lend to those [who] could not pay them back. As cash poured into banks in ever increasing amounts, caution was thrown to the wind. For a while consumers can use credit to buy more goods and services than their incomes can sustain. Ultimately, the overinvestment results in a financial crisis that causes unemployment, reductions in factory utilization and bankruptcies all of which reduce the value of investments.

“If the economy was suffering from accumulated chronic underinvestment, shifting income from the non-rich to the rich would make sense. Underinvestment would mean there was a shortage of shopping centers, hotels, housing and factories were operating at 100% of capacity but still not able to produce as many cars and other goods as people needed. It might not seem fair, but the quickest way to build up capital is to take income away from the middle class who have a high propensity to consume and give to the rich who have a propensity to save (and invest). Except for periods in the 1950s and 1960s and possibly the 1990s when tax rates on the rich just happened to be high enough to prevent overinvestment, the economy has generally suffered from periodic overinvestment cycles.

“It is not just a coincidence that tax cuts for the rich have preceded both the 1929 and 2007 depressions. The Revenue acts of 1926 and 1928 worked exactly as the Republican Congresses that pushed them through promised. The dramatic reductions in taxes on the upper income brackets and estates of the wealthy did indeed result in increased savings and investment. However, overinvestment (by 1929 there were over 600 automobile manufacturing companies in the USA) caused the depression that made the rich, and most everyone else, ultimately much poorer.

“Since 1969 there has been a tremendous shift in the tax burdens away from the rich and onto the middle class. Corporate income tax receipts, whose incidence falls entirely on the owners of corporations, were 4% of GDP then and are now less than 1%. During that same period, payroll tax rates as percent of GDP have increased dramatically. The overinvestment problem caused by the reduction in taxes on the wealthy is exacerbated by the increased tax burden on the middle class. While overinvestment creates more factories, housing and shopping centers; higher payroll taxes reduces the purchasing power of middle-class consumers.” [Italics added — RR]

I’ve been saying for years on this blog that the world is awash in capital, and the last thing the economy needs is more tax cuts for the rich so they’ll have more money to invest. The economy will never recover unless the share of GDP going to labor stops shrinking and begins growing.

Swiss Voters will be voting on May 18 for what could be the Swiss Federation’s first national minimum wage. If passed, it would be higher than the equivalent of of $15 an hour(US). Most Swiss Unions are for it, but one is opposed.

I agree with Sawant’s position, “no compromise with phantoms.” Wait till a serious counter-proposal emerges. BO had started compromising & giving away most of the turf before the discussion had seriously begun on national health care. Bad strategy (unless you believe no better outcome was possible).

But in this local battle, there is the reality that many small businesses & nonprofits have declared that “$15/no-phase-in/no-exceptions” would be lethal to their existence. Not a progressive outcome, IMO.

It’s a bridge to be crossed. Hopefully Sawant & 15now will be willing to at least meet on that bridge to discuss options.

@10, You have to be careful exempting small businesses. Most fast food restaurants are franchises. The business that operates it and hires employees is a small business. The big multinational corporation makes it profit by the franchise agreement, not operating the individual restaurants.

In this current climate of corporate personhood, if you try to differentiate between different types of small businesses you create problems that would be the basis of a court challenge.

Maybe we need to phase it in over a couple of years, but laws that get too technically clever get overturned in court.

Roger Rabbit Commentary: It sure as hell is. That’s why servers should be self-employed hospitality consultants, not hourly employees of restaurants. The minimum wage for a waitress is something like $2.13/hr., and in some establishments, the boss robs his employees again by reaching his hand into the tip jar. Minimum wage isn’t even an issue if the server incorporates herself and hires out at $50/hr. And instead of having a boss telling her what to do, as a consultant she tells him what to do. She gets to deduct her business expenses, including business travel to and from customer sites, and if her business owns her car, it’s a writeoff. No one should wait tables for a measly $15/hr. This is America! Everyone should own their own business!

David’s logic makes perfect sense. Not only Seattle but the entire state with its first come first in the primary system, is right for breakdown or reorganization of the classical two-party system. Moreover, I would expect the nature of the parties in Washington state to depend very much on locality.

Here in Seattle, I doubt that they would be much room for a Tea Party. However, I also think that the traditional Democratic Party is probably obsolete in a city where “Union” is more likely a new restaurant in a political cause.

Seattle’s demography is changing rapidly. Traditional working class families are being driven out replaced by semi-affluent workaholics from the high tech companies. Podments and Soviet style apartment buildings in South Lake Union are notable for the lack of such amenities as wide sidewalks, street front cafés, parks, bookstores, bars, or even schools. These are like the workers’ dormitories I have seen in Seoul, owned and operated by Samsung and Hyundai places to sleep rather than places to live.

This kind of worker, at least so far, is not very interested in traditional Democratic or union causes. They are more likely to buy their groceries at Whole Foods then to worry about the effect of a minimum wage on the people selling their food.

This does not bode well for the Democratic Party or for the Republican Party. It does bode well for whatever group addresses the corporatist mentality.

So, Sawan may well succeed in organize a socialist flavor party in Seattle. If she does, I expect much larger effort will be made to organize a conservative alternative consistent with the morals and ethical principles governing Amazon.

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